Why Audio Galaxy Sucks

[Marius]

Thanks for the welcome, TankGirl and JackSpratts. You're very generous - I was half expecting to be flamed mercilessly for daring to criticise Morpheus.

In answer to your questions, TankGirl, the RIAA entered into litigation with Audiogalaxy several months ago. Before that very few songs were blocked and there was a simple website hack (now fixed) that enabled them to be downloaded in any case.

Fortunately, I'd grabbed all the more obvious stuff by then and only wanted to download the work of more obscure artists. I say "fortunately", because the rule on AG is that the more obscure an artist is, the less likely he is to be "filtered" (to use AG's euphemism for "blocked").

On the other hand, *none* of Pat Metheny's songs are blocked, and he must be about the most famous jazz guitarist in the world. I've downloaded hundreds of high bitrate files of his songs I think that jazz in largely off the map for the filterers.

In practice, blocked songs can often be downloaded because their titles are misspelled, either by accident or design, thus bypassing the AG filters. Creative searching will still find almost anything.

AG has no inbuilt chat client but I think it's possible to send messages to other users. Certainly, at the foot of every artist's index on the AG website, there's a small text message program where comments and requests concerning the artist can be exchanged. There are also message boards, but the less said about them, the better.

Leeching's certainly no problem if, like me, you have fairly obscure taste in music. In any event, you can decide exactly what files you want to share, and how many. You can also throttle the bandwidth that AG uses. I'm not generally aware of who's downloading what from me, and vice versa. You have to go to some lengths to discover such information as AG's a very non-invasive program. It just runs quietly in the background (using almost no CPU juice) while the computer's free to get on with other things.

The groups exist mainly to facilitate the sharing of copyright files. Apparently, they're able to do this with impunity. I've never joined any of the groups because I've never had any problem getting the files I wanted.

Generally, AGs attitude seems to be: "If we don't see it, we don't care what you get up to". It would be very easy to block every song by a particular artist if they really wanted to. I think they've even accepted the fact that thousands of people use the spyware-free Audiogalaxy, available here:

http://home.flash.net/~critter/Audio....08WUpdate.zip

and here:

http://koxx.da.ru

Or it may just be that to make a fuss about it would only draw attention to the junk that comes with the official .exe. I notice they lost no time in removing the particularly noxious form of "scumware" that occasioned this thread, as soon as it began to attract negative publicity. It's no longer part of the download.

Few AG "updates" (spyware updates, in effect) are compulsory nowadays, and as soon as one appears that is, it's immediately reverse-engineered and posted in a spyware-free version on the MP3 newsgroups.

Check out the AG website if you're interested. You can use the search engine to get an idea of what's available without actually downloading the client.

Just make sure you're actually *inside* your tank if you go anywhere near the message boards.

Marius